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Essay to appear in Revision, Revival and Return: The Italian Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Alina Payne and Lina Bolzoni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). [in press]
Through a Mirror, Darkly: Medardo Rosso and Donatello
Daniel M. Zolli
I.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a resurging interest in
Donatello. The literature alone produced in these years—by practicing artists, curators,
and guild art historians—became so profuse that many have been tempted to speak of
Donatello’s nineteenth-century renaissance. This corpus was as diverse in scope as it
was vast: some labeled Donatello a classicizing sculptor; others an early apostle of
Renaissance naturalism; others a crypto-medieval artist whose evocations of romance
and chivalry indexed a dreamy, pre-Enlightened past; and still others a Daedalian
craftsman whose work had spanned media and disciplines.1 Together, these studies
signal an interest in the sculptor that was unrivaled, in many ways, since the
Cinquecento.
On no occasion did this spirit echo more loudly than in May 1887, when the
Florentine state inaugurated its new National Museum—the Bargello—with an
exhibition to honor the fifth centenary of the sculptor’s birth, this show curated by the
Circolo Artistico, a society of eminent local artists, aficionados, and politicians tasked
with promoting the city’s artistic heritage. For its organizers, the so-called Esposizione
Donatelliana would serve as a symbolic nimbus crowning the artist, a ritual meant to
affirm their native son’s status as the patron saint of sculpture. The catalog
1 The literature on Donatello from this period is too vast to name. Representative approaches may be found, for example, in Semper 1875; Semper 1887; Carocci 1887; Cavallucci 1886; Müntz 1885; and Trombetta 1887. For a fairly exhaustive list of these publications, see the bibliography in Pfisterer 2002, 623-50. An overview of Donatello’s nineteenth-century critica fortuna may be found in Gentilini
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accompanying the show informs us, however, that the event’s primary objective was
neither art-historical nor retrospective, but rather to expose Donatello’s example “to
living artists [in the hope] that [emulation] of him might incite them to new
endeavors.”2 It was with thoughts like these in mind that the organizers attempted
something unprecedented: to unify Donatello’s entire oeuvre in one place, bringing
together original works, plaster casts when these could not be moved, and even several
hitherto unknown objects from private collections.
To the final category belonged a diminutive statuette of David perched
triumphantly atop the lifeless head of Goliath, which the catalog identified as a bronze
cast directly from a lost wax bozzetto, or preparatory model, for the renowned marble
statue of the same subject, then in Florence’s Casa Martelli.3 If the available evidence is
any indication, it was this piece, of all those displayed, that most sensationalized
visitors: not only because it was Donatello’s lone surviving workshop model, but
because its emergence from an obscure collection in Umbria—just months prior—had
been so unexpected.
Europe’s tribe of connoisseurs was nearly unanimous in accepting the specimen
as authentic.4 Among the devotees was the German curator and scholar Wilhelm von
Bode, who purchased the iridescent relic—at considerable cost—in 1894, and
eventually made it a focal point of the bronze room in Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich
2 “Questa Mostra dunque…servirà ad onorare la memoria del grande Artefice, e a popolarizzare viepiù la sua fama, tornerà in vantaggio pure degli artefici viventi… dal che vien desto il sentimento di emulazione, se ne ha incitamento a nuovi tentativi.” In Esposizione Donatelliana nel R. Museo Nazionale 1887, V.
3 Ibid., 9, cat. no. 59. Since it entered the record in the 1880s, the bozzetto has been a mainstay in literature on Donatello, invoked perennially – into the 1990s – in discussions of his technique, his botteghe, or, more broadly, his place in histories of collecting. On the Martelli David (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), and for further references to the bozzetto, see Lewis 1985, 176-8. See also Schlegel 1968, 245-58; and Caglioti 2000, vol. 1, 251-2.
4 See, for example, Semper 1887, 72n.
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Museum. In his first published remarks on the bozzetto, four years later, Bode praised
“the assurance, vigor, and grandeur [of the] figurine”; and he marveled that the
“fleeting wax model [had been] immortalized in bronze only by chance,” plucked from
the jaws of oblivion by someone who had discerned its evidential value to posterity.5
For unlike its larger sibling—which had been marred, Bode implied, by the
interventions of less able assistants—this bozzetto delivered the unmediated trace of
Donatello’s hand at work. Bode deemed the piece’s arrival auspicious, one senses,
because it held the potential to unlock—as never before—the master’s innermost
thoughts as he deliberated the sculptural act.
In an article on the bozzetto from 2009, Volker Krahn argued—astonishingly—
that the prized artifact belonged neither to Donatello, nor even to the fifteenth century,
but was instead the work of the Milan-born sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858-1920).
Adducing the statuette’s murky provenance, its style, and numerous aspects of its
facture, Krahn constructs the most compelling case imaginable for a re-attribution to
Rosso, who was not yet thirty years old at the time of exhibition.6 Among the evidence
that Krahn produces is a photograph from the sculptor’s first studio in Milan, signed
and dated 1883, nearly a half-decade before the Esposizione Donatelliana.7 The
snapshot documents an earlier phase in the model’s creation, where compositional
5 Bode 1898, 256. 6 Krahn 2009, 40-47. For a well-reasoned critique of Krahn, see Mola and Vitucci, 340 and 344-
45. While the case for Rosso’s authorship is far from closed, it seems certain, at the very least, that the bozzetto impacted his production. The comparison Krahn draws between the model and Rosso’s Il cantante a spasso (ca. 1882), in particular, attests to the bozzetto’s entanglement with the sculptor’s production. In other words, even if Rosso acquired a copy of the bozzetto in the early 1880s, and did not produce the model himself, there can be little doubt that its scale, method of facture, and pose influenced— or was influenced by—one of his early works.
7 As Krahn himself notes, it is probable that Rosso added the date to the photographic negative much later, perhaps during his years in Paris (1889-1914). This leaves open the possibility that Rosso backdated the work.
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basics are still being worked out on a clay maquette. Here Rosso proclaims his
authorship—whether consciously or not, it hardly matters.
Given Medardo’s absolute silence on the matter, the question of his intentions
must remain speculative. We do not know whether financial need motivated the act; a
perverse ambition to fool cognoscenti; or hubris, the piece a Trojan Horse smuggled
into the exhibition, meant to court comparison with an acknowledged master. Or
alternatively, whether the bozzetto was a private exercise that had inadvertently passed
into the hands of unscrupulous dealers. It is worth stressing, however, that at the core of
this episode lay something much more fundamental: a deposit of the young sculptor’s
spirited confrontation with the work of his remote predecessor, an encounter just
narrowly glimpsed in scholarship on Medardo to date.8
In seeking to unpack this relationship, the present essay pursues two
interdependent lines of inquiry. It attempts, first, to provide a framework for
understanding Medardo’s engagement with Donatello, charting several key
biographical references, as well as more general historical developments. Donatello’s
legacy became a topic of passionate interest in the last decades of the nineteenth
century, and Medardo reveals himself—sotto voce—to be a partisan in these debates
throughout. Using these remarks as background, I then examine what impact,
specifically, Donatello had on Medardo’s practice.
Scholarship on Rosso has tended to downplay such influences, or—more starkly
still—to renounce them outright. Typically, prevailing narratives follow a plotline of
disavowal, casting the sculptor as an iconoclast who unencumbered himself of Italian
8 Giovanni Lista is, to my knowledge, the only scholar to acknowledge—more than perfunctorily—Medardo’s debt to Donatello. See Lista 2003a, 48-53; and, with somewhat less specificity, Lista 2003b, 39-49.
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influences, past and present, by moving to Paris in the late 1880s to join the French
avant-garde. This literature zeroes in on the eccentricity of Rosso’s works in particular.
On the thoroughly disarming Carne Altrui (Fig. 1), for instance, where the sculptor
merged plaster, wax, and pigment to confounding ends. Besieged by so many crabbed,
bruised, and fragmentary surfaces—the whole puncturing any claim to mimetic
legibility—many have found an aesthetic whose relationship to previous traditions of
sculpture is best described in negative terms.9 Where might Rosso fit within a
genealogy of sculptural modernism, after all, when, as one early critic opined, his
works “[did not really] resemble anything, not even sculpture”?10 No older masters, in
other words, could account for the phantasmagorical dimensions of Rosso’s objects,
their fundamental strangeness.11 Tradition went dead in his hands.
Yet it can be argued that latent in the David episode is something of much
greater consequence: a dialogue with Donatello that will remain vital to Rosso for
decades to come, shaping his work, even as he subjects the Renaissance sculptor to
considerable reinterpretation. In what ways, then, did Donatello serve Medardo’s
project? This is the large question, and in what space remains I will attempt to sketch an
answer.
9 This verdict is found passim in the literature on Rosso. For representative remarks see, for
instance, Caramel and Mola-Kirchmayr 1979; 179, Krauss 1981, 34; and Hecker 2008, 131-4. 10 Meier-Graefe 1908, 24. One trend in the historiography on Rosso’s works is to resort to
geological metaphors such as erosion and entropy. Cf. Krauss 1981: “We feel we are looking something that was shaped by the erosion of water over rock, or by the tracks of waves on sand, or by the ravages of wind” (33); or Barr 1963: “strange figures of men which seem to seem to grow out of the earth like tree trunks with spreading roots” (9).
11 In her influential account of modern sculpture, Rosalind Krauss pressed Rosso into service as the somewhat eccentric foil for Rodin’s radical effort to wrest sculpture from two dimensions into real space (see Krauss 1981, esp. 33-34). This is not the place to critique Krauss’s schema or criteria, but for representative remarks that complicate her narrative see Hecker 2003 and Tony Cragg 1994.
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II.
An analysis of Medardo’s relationship to the Renaissance is complicated by a
methodological dilemma that must be addressed at the outset: namely the artist’s own
insistent—at times pathological—rejection of his Italian heritage. As early as the 1880s,
but with increased frequency as his career progressed, Rosso waged a vocal campaign
to distance himself from Italy’s artistic past. He would claim, for example, that the
Renaissance had spawned the “most banal [and] nefarious” works; and that the revered
sculptures from that period were “nothing but paperweights,” the embodiment, that is,
of purposelessness.12 At the heart of this campaign lay an anecdote that the sculptor
circulated among his peers and critics, evidently with enough regularity—or
insistence—for it to acquire the patina of truth. Recounting his tenure in the Italian
national army in 1879-80, Rosso recalled how his troop train had passed through
Florence, and how he had “covered [his] eyes to avoid the sight of the city that had
cradled the Renaissance, which [he] already abhorred.”13
That Medardo may have renounced his Italian heritage—retrospectively or
prognostically—is not entirely surprising. The ambitious artist in him was perhaps
dismayed by the enormity of Italian tradition; and the careerist in him may have
reasoned that a French—and not Italian—passport would help him to court Parisian
patrons. Or his alleged psychodrama may have been a means of aligning himself with
Europe’s avant-garde, a self-legitimating creation myth that bore witness to what Rosso
12 See Mola and Vitucci 2009, 18; and Barr 1963, 9. See also Martini [1997], 247: “Medardo Rosso definì la vecchia scultura con una sola parola: fermacarte.”
13 Barr 1963, 10. Historical support for Medardo’s story remains scant. In the absence of any authenticating source, it is impossible to know when precisely the sculptor launched this myth. It is possible – if not certain – that he began to convey the anecdote only later in life, perhaps after he had settled in Paris. In a letter of 1909, Rosso’s friend, the writer Ardengo Soffici, related that the sculptor had told him that he never “went to Florence because he wanted to keep himself far from the peril of a beauty toute faite,” suggesting that the anecdote was in circulation before then (Soffici 1909, 142).
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would become: an artist defined by his independence from a tradition-laden past, its
works and institutions.14
And yet while such stories can be questioned, their impact on subsequent
thinking about Rosso cannot be denied. Following Medardo’s lead, literature on the
sculptor describes someone who, “unlike Rodin and the Salon sculptors, belligerently
denied the past,” who “attained artistic manhood [by wiping] out all tradition.”15 Along
parallel lines, these writings furnish the sculptor with influences that are
overwhelmingly French in orientation (this despite the fact that he spent much of his
creative life in Italy, even leaving Paris as late as 1913-17 to return to his native Milan
for months on end). In particular, scholars routinely and productively place Rosso’s
oeuvre in relation to his Parisian contemporaries, likening the fugitive surfaces of his
waxworks to Edgar Degas’s Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, for example, or the
glinting daubs of color in George Seurat’s paintings of everyday life.16
What all of these statements are avowing, in one way or another, is Rosso’s
modernity—and there is much to recommend the designation. But in accepting such
labels, tout court, are we not upholding the very myths that Medardo himself put in
place, furnishing an image of the sculptor on his own terms? Could it be that in
accepting Rosso’s claims uncritically we risk filtering out aspects of his practice that
discomfited the artist, that were fraught with ambivalence, or that his official biography
would not admit?
14 The classic reference for the modernist myth of “breaking with tradition” is Krauss 1984. 15 Barr 1963, 9, 61; Cf., the much earlier claim that “Rosso freed himself from all those
hereditary conceptions which are wont to be sources of unconscious inspiration—perhaps because he never felt them as strongly as others” (Meier-Graefe 1908, 22) 16 In her influential account of modern sculpture, Rosalind Krauss pressed Rosso into service as the somewhat conservative foil for Rodin’s radical effort to wrest sculpture from two dimensions into real space (see Krauss 1981, esp. 33-34). This is not the place to critique Krauss’s schema or criteria, but for representative remarks see Hecker 2003 and Tony Cragg 1994.
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III.
One such omission—acknowledged by scholars, to be sure, but rarely studied in
the detail it deserves—is the Scapigliatura, a group of poets, artists and scholars based
in Milan with whom Medardo remained affiliated during the 1880s and 90s (he would
renounce the affiliation only later in life, for reasons similar, one might surmise, to
those discussed above). The very fact that Medardo maintained regular contact with this
circle for roughly three-quarters of his artistic career suggests that their affinities were
more than casual. And to attend to this relationship, it can be argued, is to introduce an
alternative —and far more historically engaged—set of concerns to Rosso’s project.
Members of this fraternity united over their disapproval of modern Italy.17
Indeed, their writings burst at the seams with protests against the developing capitalism
of Italy’s monarchy, its church, and its increasingly imperialistic military. Above all,
however, scapigliati (roughly the Italian equivalent for les bohèmes) targeted Italy’s
prospering bourgeoisie, whom they blamed for rising regional tensions and the
unregulated appetite for industrial progress in the north.
For scapigliati, the bourgeois disease had also infected art of their day, much of
which looked to classical models—from antiquity and the Renaissance—in search of a
universal rhetoric of triumph to authenticate the fledgling Italian nation.18 This idealist,
17 For a general and well-historicized survey of the movement, as well as an exhaustive
bibliography, see del Principe, 1996. 18 One need not look far for an example of this mindset. In May 1881, when the city of Milan
showcased the nation’s cultural and economic achievements at the Esposizione dell’Industria e delle Belle Arti, it drew explicit connections between their age and the Renaissance, “that ascendant movement, when [Italy had cast away] the chains of the Middle Ages…to give the world the likes of Vinci, Sanzio, and Buonarotti, [a moment], like the epochs of Hadrian and Pericles [where] art and industry were merged in a single embrace” (Sozogno 1881, 9). The artists exhibited at the Esposizione were largely local (i.e., from Lombardy) and neoclassical in orientation.
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bourgeois ideology of the aesthetic—and its tendency to gather art and industry in the
same breath—was, for scapigliati, a conspiracy to deny the realities of contemporary
life. While the state bolstered Italy’s radiant narrative of progress, it obscured those
who languished in its shadow. For scapigliati, then, it was an ethical duty to present life
unexempt of its most unsettling aspects. Inspired by French modernists of the 1860s
like Baudelaire and Manet, scapigliati (roughly the Italian equivalent for les bohèmes)
spotlighted individuals who had been casualties of progress: the poor and the
marginalized, “children of sick fathers,” in the words of the poet Emilio Praga, “eagles
losing their feathers, [who] flutter about silent [and] starved.”19 To depict these subjects
truthfully: this was the central plank of Scapiglitatura’s platform, the essence of what
Felice Cameroni (a doyen of the movement) would call “[nostro] realismo scapigliato.”
It was within this context that Donatello emerged as a consistent talking point
among members of Scapigliatura. By the 1860s, many had joined what might fairly be
called a struggle over Donatello’s legacy, a struggle that played out in an ever-
burgeoning literature on the artist. One conventional reading from this time fixed on
Donatello’s re-discovery of Italy’s Greco-Roman heritage, a reading with parallels in
the state-sponsored neo-classical art that flourished about mid-century. Consider, for
example, the full-length, marble portrait of Donatello that the academic sculptor
Girolamo Torrini had wrought for the Uffizi around 1848 (Fig. 2), this one of twenty-
eight statues of ‘uomini illustri’ made to ring the loggiato of that building (the program
was completed in 1858).20 Torrini’s Donatello is an uncompromising agent of
classicism: not only in its Apollonian restraint, its material, and in what Donatello
19 English translation provided by Principe, 12. 20 On this program and its underlying political and cultural agendas, see Scudieri 2011.
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sculpts (a classicizing portrait relief stands at his feet), but in where he locates
inspiration, his gaze—and ever-rationale mind—trained upward toward Olympian
heights (and thus away from both the tools with which he labors and the lived world
around him). Consider, too, the twenty-foot-tall colossus of Dante Alighieri that Enrico
Pazzi fashioned some two decades later, this set in the square of Santa Croce in
Florence, and ceremoniously inscribed and dated 1865 (the six-hundredth anniversary
of the poet’s birth, but also the year that Florence became Italy’s capital). The figure’s
dependence on Donatello’s Saint George is palpable: not only in its contrapposto pose,
but in the manner in which its limbs are arrayed, its smoldering stare, which, as in
Donatello’s knight, lingers somewhere in the distant space of thought. Here, in a
productive misreading of the normative interpretation of Saint George, Pazzi
transforms Donatello’s icon of chivalric courage into a modern-day defender of the
Italian capital.
The scapigliati rejected this use of Donatello completely; rejected the notion
that Donatello’s legacy lay in his appeal to reason or normative classical ideals. Indeed,
it is tempting to see Pazzi’s scowling, beetle-browed giant as the very embodiment of
the type of monumental statuary that Medardo, channeling his fellow scapigliati, would
later call a “negation of life,” that which anesthetized viewers in its appeal to abstract
virtues and moral codes (how deeply the scapigliati must have moaned at the
Esposizione Donatelliana, with its triumphal rhetoric, and its enlistment of art—and
artists—in the cultural project of the state).21 Rather, for scapigliati, Donatello’s real
achievement had been to reground sculpture in mundane experience. His relevance to
21 Cited in Moure 1997, 22.
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modernity was found not in the stony classicism of George, but in works like the Mary
Magdalene—a piece that became a touchstone of conversations about Donatello’s
realism.
With the Magdalene, to extract from these accounts, Donatello had delivered a
view of the human condition “in all of its realism, full of sentiment and severity
(crudezza),” a vision of the mendicant that was profoundly affecting, “[her] pain
immense, [her pathos] contagious, [all of her] emotions true.”22 This was life laid bare:
the Magdalene’s tresses of hair are unruly, the crenellation of her two teeth crooked,
her flesh pale, necrotic, and “worn out from fasting and abstinence.”23 In her
vulnerability, her unprepossessing appearance, in her very disenfranchisement from
civilization, the Magdalene must have looked—to scapigliati eyes—like an emblem of
the destitution of modern life. The brutal realism of the statue supplied, moreover, a
mighty counter-example to what sculpture had become in their opinion: artificial,
idealizing, and tainted by the ideology of the bourgeoisie.
It was sentiments like these that led Scapigliatura to deputize Donatello as the
patriarch of their movement, a paragon of non-conformity who had similarly looked
with disapproval at his own age.24 For scapigliati, the Renaissance signaled the
beginning of modernity’s discontents, and in Donatello they found a historical figure
who had shared, and who could legitimate, their iconoclastic agenda.
22 Carocci 1887, 80; Trombetta 1887, 161-62. Trombetta devotes a lengthy chapter to the question of Donatello’s realism (157-94). So, as well, does Hans Semper in his monograph from ten years earlier (see Semper 1875, 133ff).
23 Carocci 1887, 80. 24 It bears mentioning that these readings of Donatello as non-conformist, and as practitioner of
a kind of realism not yet claiming the name, extended well beyond scapigliati circles. In his monograph on Donatello, for example, the German art historian Hans Semper wrote that the sculptor had “sought to emancipate [sculpture] from the suffocating idealism of [the Renaissance]”; that he had “challenged the shapeless chimeras of [its philosophy],” and opposed “the immoral power bids of ecclesiastical dogma” and “political tyranny” (see Semper 1875, 133).
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Here timing matters. When Medardo matriculated to the Scapigliatura—in the
early 1880s—he joined a party with Donatello as its father figure. This fact cannot have
been lost on Rosso. His close personal ties to those who most vociferously advocated
Donatello’s realism make it inconceivable that he was not au fait with this
interpretation of the sculptor. And yet no personal testimony, no letter, not even a
passing mention attest to anything more than a superficial familiarity with the older
artist. Given Rosso’s tightly managed approach to his writings, however, it is sensible
to query whether these are the documents that would best register such interest, or
whether one is better served looking elsewhere.
IV.
On the basis of photographic evidence, it is possible to verify the existence,
beginning in 1883, of no less than five plaster casts of works by Donatello in Rosso’s
workshops: a relief of the so-called Madonna Pazzi; heads of St. Francis and Anthony
(both cropped from the original life-size figures); a bust of Niccolò da Uzzano; and
another of a simpering boy (now attributed to Desiderio da Settignano, but then almost
unanimously given to Donatello).25 In his pursuit of copies, Rosso may well have
received assistance and encouragement from Camillo Boito—an esteemed historian,
theorist of restoration, and a partisan of Scapigliatura. In the early 1880s, Boito had
been elected to oversee the reconstruction of Donatello’s high altar ensemble for the
Basilica di Sant’Antonio in Padua, and as part of his research had embarked upon a
systematic survey of the sculptor’s oeuvre, quite possibly taking plaster casts during
25 Giovanni Lista offers several brief but suggestive remarks about these plaster copies, and their
eventual acquisition by private collectors. See Lista 2003a, 109. On the attribution of the so-called Bambino Ridente see Mola and Vittucci 2009, 333-45 and, especially, 100n6.
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these visits.26 At the same time, Rosso may have acquired the replicas from Bode, who
had himself, in these same years, ordered casts of each of Donatello’s Paduan works,
this in preparation for his landmark 1883 monograph on the topic (the resulting
volume—Donatello in Padua—holds the curious distinction of being the first study on
the artist endowed with photographic reproductions, even though the entire suite was
shot from casts).27 Upon finishing the book, Bode had undertaken to place these
copies—evidently with great care—in collections both public and private, and it would
not have been unimaginable for him to furnish Rosso with one or more of the casts, or
otherwise copies from them (the two were familiar, after all, if not necessarily well
acquainted).28
Although the provenance of these casts must remain open to speculation, the
allure they held for Rosso is unmistakable. That this modest corpus of replicas became
a staple of the sculptor’s creative life can be inferred, in the first place, from their
continuous presence in his studios. While the sculptor jettisoned other studies as he
moved from one atelier to the next, these copies invariably traveled with him. A photo
of Medardo at work in his shop in Montmartre from 1890, for example, confirms that
he kept the Francis close to hand almost a decade after its initial acquisition (Fig. 3).
Should we accept, moreover, that the photo is staged—nothing about it is casual, after
all, from the arrangement of objects in the room, to how each sculpture is displayed, to
26 Boito would publish the results of his research in 1895, and again, in significantly expanded
form, in 1897. See Boito 1895; and Boito 1897. The ideological underpinnings – and somewhat imaginative nature - of Boito’s reinstallation became something of a cause célebrè in the subsequent century (for the substance of these critiques see Castellani 2000, 12-13; and Papi 2010, 153-66).
27 In the introduction to Donatello in Padua, Bode explained that the casting campaign, backed by the administration at Berlin’s Royal Museums, owed to the lack of a complete photographic corpus documenting Donatello’s high altar (see Bode 1883, 6 and note). On Bode’s campaign see Gentilini 1985, 405).
28 On Rosso and Bode’s relationship see Krahn 2009, 46 and 47n28.
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Rosso himself, who attends to his work with almost Pygmalion-like tenderness—then it
may even index a certain pride in the Donatello replica, given that replica’s centrality in
the composition, and the attention it commands. Indeed, as late as 1904, Rosso could be
found boasting to the gallerist Auguste Artaria of certain copies that he had produced,
among them “6 buste de personage par Donatello, cire,” further evidence of the
protracted nature of Medardo’s interest.29
Medardo’s copies after Donatello are not unknown to specialists, who have
responded to these objects in two ways. Adopting Medardo’s own nomenclature, but
perhaps mistaking his intentions, some have labeled these works ‘pezzi di paragone,’ or
‘comparison pieces,’ noting the artist’s tendency “at exhibitions or [during studio visits
to] place them beside his other works to demonstrate, through juxtaposition, his [own]
sculptures’ superiority…as if he were in direct competition with the [Renaissance].”30
Meanwhile, those unwilling to concede any relationship to Medardo’s work, even a
negative one, have classified these replicas as strictly financial in motivation, one-offs
that the sculptor, in a pinch, could sell to make end’s meet.31 Both approaches sustain
the same basic idea: that Medardo’s copies reflect—indeed materialize—the sculptor’s
agonistic stance toward the past. In the former case, the casts are pressed into service as
clumsy foils for Rosso’s progressivism, visually staging his victory over tradition; in
the latter, they stand for the literal liquidation of that tradition.
What these accounts paper over, however, are the various occasions—all
admittedly private—in which Rosso referred to these same works as “masterpieces,” a
29 Cited in Mola and Vittucci 2009, 338. 30 Caramel 1994, 41. 31 See, for example, Barr 1963, 56.
15
term that places the objects in a decidedly more positive light.32 It should be
acknowledged, in each case, that Rosso’s praise may not have been for what the copies
imitated (i.e., their relationship to Donatello) so much as for their value as objects in
themselves. After all, several of these replicas differed significantly from their
prototypes, in format especially.33 Thus, the casts that Rosso owned of Donatello’s
Francis and Anthony re-produced just the head and neck of what were in reality full-
length sculpted figures—a de-contextualization that afforded the works greater
intimacy, riveting viewers’ attention on the figures’ psychology in ways that their larger
counterparts did not (it was precisely the lack of intimacy in the originals—their
sociable distance from the viewer—that someone of Medardo’s ken may have found
unsavory). And yet, whether or not Medardo’s interest lay in the originals, or in their
re-consecrated modern adaptations, he recognized that these copied “masterpieces”
began with Donatello. How starkly at odds such a position is with the official stance
that the sculptor adopted vis-à-vis the Renaissance around these same years! Such faint
silhouettes of interest suggest, then, that even while Medardo circulated myths among
his French colleagues to the contrary, he allowed Donatello—confidentially, at least—a
more complex role in his practice.
V.
Medardo’s enduring fascination with these casts raises the question of whether,
or to what extent, they left traces in his work. In what ways did Rosso assimilate their
32 See, for example, Medardo’s letter to Gottfried Eissler in 1903 (quoted in Mola and Vittucci
2009, 335 and 341n2). 33 Giancarlo Gentilini has made a similar point about Donatello casts, although not with respect
to Medardo. See Gentilini 1985, 405.
16
lessons, and in what ways did he reinterpret them? A comparison between Madre e
bambino che dormono—among Medardo’s earliest documented sculptures, from around
1883—and Donatello’s Madonna Pazzi helps to focus the issue (Figs. 4, 5).34 Here,
Rosso conserves the formal essence of his model: echoes may be found, for instance, in
the orientation of the group, their exchanged glances, the mother’s gently titled head,
and the position of the child’s hand, turned here into formless mass. Even the intimacy
of scale lingers.
But Medardo departs from his model in striking ways. He abstracts the pair
from any possible narrative context: no ground, no decorative adornments, no
iconographic prompts to act as footholds. Along parallel lines, the sculpture is made
using a great economy of means. Whereas Donatello had trained his chisel on
minutiae— tousled hair, rippling drapery, delicate folds of skin—Medardo’s sculpture
is raw in its modeling, and visibly handmade (many of its effects are produced with
fingers alone). What Medardo has done, it would seem, is strip Donatello’s piece down
to its emotional nucleus, isolating the gentle impress of the mother’s cheek against her
child’s. This gesture is rendered additionally vulnerable by the fact that the group is no
longer sheltered by an architectural niche, or within virtual space, as in Donatello.
Cleaved from these securities, the object instead exists in our space. The fact that Rosso
cast Madre e bambino in ‘eternal’ bronze ought in principle to have ennobled the work,
34 Here, and elsewhere, I rely on the dates put forth in Mola and Vittucci’s magisterial catalogue raisonné. On the difficulty of dating Medardo’s works—and especially the perilous chronology of his copies—see, for example, Mola and Vittucci 2009, passim. On this work in particular see 236-7. Rosso also called the sculpture Amore materno, but this appellation appears only in 1886. The work is known only through photographs (Mola and Vittucci suggest that Rosso destroyed the gesso in May 1889 when he left for Paris).
17
but this proves not especially true.35 Occupying a scale that is neither charmingly small
nor imposing, the artifact looks both anonymous and insignificant, a frail thing almost
held together—but only barely—by the pair’s embrace.36
Less than one year later, in early 1884, Medardo produced what might fairly be
called a sequel to Madre e Bambino.37 A shared pedigree is suggested by the mother’s
face, almost identical in its physiognomic detail and sketchy modeling. Indeed, the very
name of the work—Dorme or She Sleeps—binds it to its predecessor. But as the title
suggests, Medardo has excised one element—the infant—from his new composition,
stripping the original work (and by extension the Pazzi Madonna) down to an even
more iconic core. Rosso’s reduction of the child to anomic formlessness was not
without consequences, for it increases the work’s affective appeal to viewers. Gone is
the delicacy of maternal touch, with the mother—now alone—reduced to a fragment,
peering out from a sedimentary—almost moldering—knot of material.
Five years later, in one of his first undertakings in Paris—the Bambina Ridente
of 1889—Medardo similarly pared a work by Donatello down to its emotional essence
(Fig. 7).38 He emptied his portrait of extraneous details of costume and attribute. Even
the base was done away with to enhance the immediacy of the child’s laughter: unself-
conscious, neck craned forward, mouth agape, revealing tongue and small teeth.
Although there can be little doubt that Medardo had here looked to the Laughing Boy
35 This bronzework was Medardo’s first—and probably only—copy of the gesso matrix for
Madre e Bambino (see Mola and Vittucci, 236-37). 36 In the paragone debate, durability was the ingredient most often adduced to support bronze
sculpture’s superiority to painting. That Rosso has here—paradoxically—made bronze look so unglorified, so fragile, might be seen as an effort to undo or undermine bronze’s claims to integrity (a point further magnified in the absence of a plinth or supporting structure).
37 On the genesis of Dorme, its dating, and history see Mola and Vittucci 2009, 78-84 and 242. 38 Mola and Vittucci date the gesso model to 1889, but the first copy—in bronze—to 1895-99.
See Mola and Vittucci 2009, 268-69.
18
(then attributed to Donatello) for inspiration, the sculptor’s personal testimonies
encourage just the opposite conclusion. On at least one occasion, Rosso declared that he
made this portrait after one Marie-Jacques Enjolras, the daughter of a staff member at
the Hôpital Lariboisière, where the artist was recovering from a lengthy bout with
influenza.39
Why would Medardo have insisted that he modeled his portrait directly sur le
vif? One possibility is that he wished to downplay his original source, certainly, one has
to believe, because the association would compromise his work’s originality, and
thereby Rosso’s efforts to constitute himself as a modernist. Claiming that the bust
represented the direct registration of visible reality (or at least his perception of reality),
and thus that it had no mediating model, was one way of maneuvering himself out of
the troubled waters of influence. At the same time, insisting that the Bambina ridente
originated in a face-to-face encounter with another subjectivity—that it was linked to a
singular, spontaneous experience—guaranteed the uniqueness of what he made. It is an
aesthetic position similar to that adopted by the Impressionists, whose own efforts to
appoint the self as the sole agent of artistic creation had, by the 1880s, made them
fixtures of the vanguardist discourse of originality. Like the Impressionists, whose
paintings Rosso appears to have studied while in Paris, the sculptor styles his work as
the transcription of sensory data, and little more.40
39 In a letter to Felice Cameroni dated December 1889 Rosso wrote that he had “almost finished
[his] portrait of the young girl of an administrator (economo) at the hospital” (quoted in Mola and Vittucci 2009, 110n1).
40 There exists a robust literature that aligns Rosso’s sculptural practice with Impressionism. For a discussion of this association—which Rosso both courted and rejected—as well an overview of scholarship on the topic see Lista 2003a, 147-70 and 272-74. For a critique of Impressionism’s claim to originality see Shiff 1984.
19
Despite Medardo’s efforts to exempt his work from influence, the echoes
proved too powerful for some critics to miss. Writing in 1909, and referring to the
Bambina in particular, the poet and artist Ardengo Soffici noted that “no sculptor [after]
the incomparable Donatello [understood] and could express so well the qualities and
spirit of that unripe age.”41 For this critic, at least, Medardo’s work was ‘donatellesque’
in spirit if not—as the sculptor would have us believe—in letter.
Taken together, these three early works betray the immense care with which
Medardo studied Donatello. But they also discourage the view that Rosso’s conduct
was archaeological in nature. It was not about excavating past forms or types; it was
about re-enchanting them, about extracting the kernel of their realism—a mother’s
caress, her isolation, a child’s mirth—and activating it in the here and now.
How did this re-enchantment figure later in the sculptor’s career? As Rosso
began to establish himself more firmly in Paris, he arguably intensified the realist
dimension of his work, entrenching his project still more in the pathos of modernity—
of the decrepit, a decrepitude whose dialectical counterpart was beauty. Crucial to this
heightened rhetoric of realism was Medardo’s appeal to new materials, paraffin wax
foremost among them, this sometimes interlaced with tempera paint, shellac, and even
sand. Significantly, Medardo utilized this multi-media approach not only to create new
subjects (the Ecce puer of 1906, for example), but to re-make earlier ones. Beginning in
the late 1890s, Rosso began to produce variants of his works from the previous
decades, working from the same plaster matrices, but availing himself of these new
materials to push the expressive resources of his realism to new extremes.
41 Soffici 1909, 28.
20
This campaign began with a second iteration of Bambina Ridente, which Rosso
produced in 1899. In this version, Rosso used not bronze but plaster covered with a
quasi-epidermal layer of wax (Fig. 8). How different the effects produced by these
media! Where the uniform brown varnish of the first specimen might suggest general
good health, the skin of its companion is mottled, wilted, and sallow in appearance.
Blotches of darker pigment cling to the surface like some parasitic residue, obfuscating
many of the child’s features. Such tactics lend the work an overall indeterminacy of
meaning. Faced with so many contused surfaces, that is, one might reasonably wonder
whether the child simpers or grimaces, whether she pulses with life or is, instead, gray
with fatigue.
This tendency toward indeterminacy became even more pronounced in Rosso’s
subsequent adaptations. In 1905, for example, the sculptor submitted Dorme to a
second reduction, drifting from his original source—the Pazzi Madonna—still further
(Fig. 1). Here, Medardo’s prototype becomes virtually unrecognizable: the subject is
solitary, brittle, spidery, and ruinous. Figure and ground are driven toward a dense
confusion, with the erstwhile mother peeling herself from the puckered junction of
painted wax and plaster. Perhaps in an effort to obscure his subject further, Rosso
outfitted the sculpture with the more gnomic title Carne Altrui (The Flesh of Others),
and thus changed its putative referent (several of Medardo’s contemporaries would
identify the subject as a prostitute, a rather ironic inversion of the work’s original
inspiration, the Virgin Mary).42 It may come as little surprise, then, that one later
42 Cf. Soffici 1910: “Carne altrui is [the] misery of pleasure sold, registered here on the face of
a poor, tired girl. In the shadow of the fringe and in the curls that cover her face, in her eyes which hide from shame: her mouth is sad, still wet from strange kisses...You will recognize her, friend, for she is the accomplice and victim of man’s primal instincts” (23).
21
critic—perhaps confounded by works like this—wondered whether Medardo made
sculptures that were invaluable (in aesthetic terms) or, rather, “Milanese waste
products” (un cascame Milanese).43 Was it even appropriate to call Rosso a sculptor, he
inveighed, when his sculptures were “pathetic,” when everything he made “seemed to
fall apart”?44
Although the above remarks are derogatory in nature, they reveal something at
the heart of Medardo’s project. Indeed, it can be argued that fragility—an aesthetic of
“falling apart”—came to have a paradigmatic meaning for Rosso, one joining his
subjects, his materials, and his technique. If Medardo’s realism had led him to
Donatello, then it also led him, at this later stage in his career, to tamper with the very
stuff of sculpture, its material substrate. In an effort to capture the essence of what it
meant to be alive in modernity, in other words, Rosso had resorted to making “pathetic”
sculptures, works that materialized a vision of human life that was vulnerable and
impermanent, no different—no more important—than knotted clay and wax. To
paraphrase, Medardo aspired, with his sculptures, to turn something perishable into
something immortal, to carve out a space in which the spectator might contemplate
human subjectivity under the conditions of its systematic undoing.
VI.
To develop our argument in one final way, we might consider how Donatello
enters Medardo’s project at a material level. As we have seen, Medardo’s sculptures—
especially those produced from the mid-1890s—frequently mingled plaster, wax,
pigment, and clay. It bears mentioning that this fusion of pedestrian materials was
43 Martini [1997], 9. 44 Ibid., 29, 279.
22
virtually unprecedented in the nineteenth century (certainly in finished works), but
belonged, as some of Rosso’s contemporaries acknowledged, to the legacy of
Donatello.45
If we accept the proposition that Rosso consciously revived the ‘crude
materiality’ evinced by works like the Magdalene, we must then ask to what end? As
nineteenth-century commentators knew well, materials have a social valence – they are
inscribed with notions of class and ideology. We might, by way of comparison, recall
some of the criticisms leveled against Medardo’s contemporary August Rodin, and
particularly those concerning his use of media. Rodin’s ample reliance on ‘eternal’
bronze and marble, some critics held, was a shameless appeal to the taste of the
bourgeois nouveaux riches who so enthusiastically supported him.46 In their very raw
matter, that is, Rodin’s sculptures met consumer demand. Medardo’s preferred
materials, by contrast, look like a sober corrective to this practice. In their humility,
which borders on decrepitude, these substances defiantly assert their independence
from bourgeois sensibilities.47 It is suggestive to think, then, that in an effort to purify
sculpture of bourgeois aesthetics, Medardo had revived an archaic practice that he
related so strongly to Donatello.
45 This is not to doubt the very real impact that Edgar Degas may have had on Rosso. Indeed,
Rosso would have known about—although not had physical access to—Degas’s Petite Danseuse as early as 1883 (see Hecker in Cooper 2003, 34), and it can be no coincidence that Rosso’s interest in wax in the late 1880s was roughly contemporaneous with his first encounter with the French sculptor. Nevertheless, Donatello’s materials are nearly identical to Rosso’s, offering an analogy arguably much stronger than Degas.
46 Benjamin Buchloh has admirably summarized this critique and its implications. See Buchloh 2003, esp. 4-6. For late nineteenth-century critiques of sculpture as commodity more generally, see Droth 2004, 141-66. For the more general trend of bronze and bourgeois taste in the latter half of the 1800s see De Caso 1975, 1-28.
47 Even when Rosso produced his works in bronze, he lessened the material’s overall appeal by allowing it to remain raw, and riddled with the vestiges of casting such as pockmarks, fissures and holes. In his mature bronzes, Rosso even corrupted the molten metal with sand (on these processes see Cooper 2003, esp. 70-93)
23
This issue of revival brings us back, by way of conclusion, to the exhibition
with which this essay began. The show’s premise had been to expose Donatello to
living artists the better to “incite them to new endeavors.” In Donatello, Medardo found
an individual who had similarly looked with disapproval at his own age, someone who
had opposed classical idealism by stridently showing its antithesis: an unadulterated
view of humanity, gritty, plangent, true to life. Accordingly, Medardo approached the
older artist’s work like a metal from which some long-forgotten substance might be
released, infused in the present, and mobilized in an effort to document the ephemeral
beauty of his age.
At stake is more than the matter of influence, however—two sculptors caught in
a solitary binary orbit, as it were. To attend to Rosso’s encounter with Donatello, I have
tried to suggest, is to make it impossible to see the young sculptor as disinterested in his
historical inheritance (as some, and even Rosso himself, would have us believe), but
rather constantly, even painfully, aware of its presence—a presence as ponderous and
real as the tangled clay from which his sculptures were made. It is to grant the
Renaissance a much more significant role in Rosso’s oeuvre, indeed to see it as
intimately bound to his very critical project: to purge sculpture of its triumphalist
pretensions, and to suffuse what shell remained with the real spirit of modernity.
If Donatello offered the antidote to such triumphalism, however, his example
also proved potentially poisonous, for it threatened to undermine Rosso’s status as an
avant-garde artist. Foregrounding this paradox helps, for one thing, to explain the
discrepancy between Rosso’s words and his work. For another, it accounts for the
uneasy place that the artist occupies in narratives of modern art. For sculptures like
24
Carne Altrui (Fig. 1) cannot wholly be explained using the critical terms of modernism
(innovation, rupture, and the like). Nor do more traditionalist positions—those staked
on art’s continuity with the past—obtain. Rather, it would seem, Rosso’s works inhabit
an interstitial space between these two opposing—indeed incommensurable—aesthetic
ideologies. It is arguably this lack of a neat fit with either—the ambivalence that
Rosso’s works exhibit toward tradition, that is, and particularly Donatello’s tradition—
more than anything else, that grants Rosso’s fragments the “uncanny” air so often
described by critics. Never quite embracing tradition, nor rejecting it, Rosso’s works
live in an aesthetic borderland, partaking of both positions, but always “without home.”
That these facets of Rosso’s work have remained relatively hidden—their
contours perhaps blunted by time, by the criteria that organize our narratives of modern
art, or owing to the artist’s own willful obscurantism—has only been to our detriment
however. For with his sculptures, Medardo posited a dimension of life that could, on
the one hand, never be fully destroyed—his subjects become immortal or universal not
despite but because they are casualties of modernity. But his sculptures also posit a
dimension of life that will never be fully reintegrated into a world in which it no longer
has a place. Understood in these terms, Medardo may be the most ‘real’ sculptor of the
nineteenth century. And this, to conclude, had much to do with Donatello.
25
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27
Fig 1. Medardo Rosso, Carne altrui [version 3], ca. 1905-6, plaster, wax, and pigment. 23.45 x 22.5 x 16 cm. Paris, Galerie de France.
28
Fig 2. Girolamo Torrini (with Giovanni Bastianini), Donatello, 1848, marble (part of the series of ‘uomini illustri’). Florence, Loggiato, Galleria degli Uffizi
29
Fig 3. Photograph of Medardo in his workshop at Montmartre, 1890.
30
Fig 4. Donatello, Madonna Pazzi, ca. 1420, marble. 74.5 x 69.5 cm. Berlin, Bode- Museum.
31
Fig 5. Medardo Rosso, Madre e Bambino che dormono (also Amore Materno), c. 1883, bronze. 39 x 28 x 20 cm. Private collection.
32
Fig 6. Medardo Rosso, Carne Altrui (formerly Dorme) [version 1], 1883-84. 50 x 41.5 x 19 cm. Barzio, Museo Rosso.
33
Fig 7. Plaster cast after Desiderio da Settignano (formerly attributed to Donatello), Laughing boy, ca. 1460, marble. 33cm (h). Owned by Medardo Rosso. Private collection.
34
Fig 8. Medardo Rosso, Bambina Ridente [version 2], ca. 1899 (?), plaster, wax, and pigment. 27.5 x 19 x 18 cm. Madrid, Centro de arte Reina Sofia, Inc.
